New Normal: America in Decline

Aug 16, 2010

RUSH: Mort Th’Zuckerman is back with another piece of writing, this time in the Wall Street Journal about the regime. His piece today is entitled: ‘The End of American Optimism,’ which he defines in the first paragraph. This is fascinating to see what Mort Th’Zuckerman considers to be optimistic. Listen to this opener: ‘Our brief national encounter with optimism is now well and truly over. We have had the greatest fiscal and monetary stimulus in modern times. We have had a whole series of programs to pay people to buy cars, purchase homes, pay off their mortgages, weatherize their homes, and install solar paneling on their roofs. Yet the recovery remains feeble and the aftershocks of the post-bubble credit collapse are ongoing.’

We tried all this optimistic stuff and it didn’t work? Whether that’s what he means or not, this is an incredible paragraph: ‘Our brief national encounter with optimism is now well and truly over. We have had the greatest fiscal and monetary stimulus in modern times. We have had a whole series of programs to pay people to buy cars, purchase homes, pay off their mortgages, weatherize their homes, and install solar paneling on their roofs,’ all to stimulate the economy. None of it worked. It remains feeble. The aftershocks of the post-bubble credit collapse are ongoing. ‘We are at least 2.5 million jobs short of getting back to the unemployment rate of under 8% promised by the Obama administration. Concern grows that we are looking at a double-dip recession and hovering on the brink of a destructive deflation. Things are bad enough for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to have characterized the economic outlook late last month as ‘unusually uncertain.’ Are we at the end of the post-World War II period of growth? Tons of money have been shoveled in to rescue reckless banks and fill the huge hole in the economy, but nothing is working the way it normally had in all our previous crises.’

Really? Has this kinda stimulus worked in the past to revive an economy? I’m not aware of that. I know the Keynesians believe it has, but World War II was not Keynesian stimulus. Any rate, ‘Rather, we are in what a number of economists are referring to as the ‘new normal.’ This is a much slower-growing economy that, recent surveys have revealed, is causing many Americans to distance themselves from the long-held assumption that their children will have it better than they.’ Well, once again, ladies and gentlemen, it’s up to me to properly define the term, the new normal. According to Mort Th’Zuckerman and all of these economists he’s referring to, the new normal means, ‘You know what? The salad days are over. The idea that your kids are going to do better than you, look, we had our run, we really gave it our best shot, but that can’t go on, we just can’t sustain, we can’t lead the world economically, can’t go on. The new normal is you better expect things to get worse. Don’t expect to get a job in the next two to three years, gonna take at least that long to get down to 8% unemployment. Really there’s not a whole lot of to look forward to.’ That’s the new normal. That’s what they say it is.

Can I tell you what the new normal is? What do you think, Dawn? You’re nodding. What do you think the new normal is? No idea? Well, you were nodding at me as you were all knowing. Snerdley? I love doing this, folks, ask people: what do you think the new normal really is? What is it? I’ll tell you what the new normal is. No, the new normal is simply a construction designed to save Obama and the Democrats from any association with this economic collapse. Calling this a new normal is simply saying, ‘Hey, this is not the result of any Democrat policy. This is not the result of Obamanomics, no. This is just America. And by golly by gosh, Obama’s doing the best he can with it, but he’s only got so much to work with. The new normal, it is what it is. This is not the result of bad economic policy. This is not the fault of Obama.’ The new normal is defining the Obama depression down. This is ridiculous. And you as a citizen ought not settle for the idea that this is America going forward, that this is the new normal, ’cause I’m telling you right now, it’s not. All this, quote, unquote, new normal is an excuse. It’s giving Obama and the regime a pass. We’ve gone from optimism to opticism. And opticism, the optics, how it looks, ah, it’s just the new normal.

Anybody who is optimistic at Obama’s stimulus program, those are the people that need to be cast away. Those are the people that need to be ignored. These Keynesians, oh, yeah, this is the way, they said. This is what we have to do. This will create jobs, shovel-ready, all that rotgut. We now know 20 months, it’s all a bust, all the bailouts, all the stimuli have failed, and so now what we have is a new normal, yeah. This is it, folks, get used to it, this is the new America, in decline. And it’s just coincidental that it happened when the Obama regime took office. To give you an idea of how poorly Keynesian economics worked, the stock market never reached its 1929 peak until 1954. Now, let me put this in perspective for you. We tried Keynesian stimulus policy, FDR, the New Deal. That’s gonna bring us out of the 1929 depression. Guess what? We didn’t reach stock market peaks that were existed in ’29 until 1954. It only took 25 years to get back to where we were in 1929 with Keynesian stimuli. So the new normal means if you’re not happy, tough toenails. If you’re not happy, lower your expectations, ’cause this is it, baby. The new normal is designed to get you to give up. The new normal is a creation to get you to go ahead and accept mediocrity in your country.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The new normal. Let me define it for you further. The new normal is a $7 million yacht with no state taxes for John F. Kerry, the haughty senator who once served in Vietnam. The new normal is a new beachfront mansion and a host of private planes for Algore. The new normal is a super wedding for Chelsea Clinton. The new normal is 30 luxury rooms at a five-star European resort for Moochelle Obama. But the new normal for us is to tighten our belts and to accept excrement sandwiches, some days with mustard and some days not. The new normal is no expectations. The new normal is: ‘Get real. Get with it. This is your lot in life.’ So when Mort Th’Zuckerman and the rest of these people write about the new normal, these so-called economists that he quotes, ask yourself: Where do we go to get the old normal back?

I’ll tell you, the first place we go to get the old normal back is the ballot box. That’s going to be in November. Have you noticed the Democrat Party does not stand up for this country? They just don’t — and in fact not only do they not stand up for the country, any chance they get to join in criticism of this country, they get in line. They race to be the first to speak! Let me just put it out there. In the middle of wars the Democrat Party undermines our armed forces. Iraq, anybody? Harry Reid famously said, ‘This war is lost,’ when our brave soldiers were fighting on the battlefields of Iraq. The Democrat Party does not believe we should secure our border. The Democrat Party does not believe we should enforce federal immigration law.

When it comes to zoning at Ground Zero, they stand with an imam who refuses to denounce Hamas — and then they have the gall to tell us, ‘This is what America is all about.’ Well, America is not about losing wars. America is not about a nation in decline with no great expectations for the future. America is not about giving up. America is not about opening the borders to virtually anybody who wants to get into the country and corrupt it for the sake of empowering one corrupt political party. That’s not what America is all about. Notice all of the perversion, all of the corruption, all of the outrageousness that the Democrats stand up and say, ‘This is what America’s about,’ and it’s not.

The Democrat Party is not about what America is about, and that’s the big problem that we face. The Democrat Party arguably, you could say that they were — and remember, it was just week. (laughing) It was just last week our good friends at The Politico with a big story on how offbeat Republican candidates are. Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee. How kooky, weird, and oddball Republican candidates are. In the meantime, the new normal is a bunch of anti-America — or America’s wrong, blame-America-first — Democrats is what America is like all about.